noob rigging question

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi, as i said i am not very experienced in rigging and have decided to give it a go with just a generic character model to get in some practice over the break.

when i try to make a hierarchy of sorts by parenting the spine bone to the arm bones it connects the top of the spine bone to the bottom of the arm bone, how can i get around that?

how do i connect the bottom of the spine to the top of the thigh bones to create a hip without using unnecessary bones? is it IK chains? (if so i don’t know how to use them yet lol)

thanks for your help in advance!

2

Once you have the two bones and wish to parent one to the other parent them but after you press ctrl-p click ‘keep offset’ instead of ‘connected’.
If you have already have the parent you can also select the bone you wish to disconnect and press alt-p (and click ‘disconnect’)
IK chains work through disconnected bones (with real IK, not sure about auto IK) which is pretty cool.

I have trouble describing these types of things so I may be able to make a video if you need it.

3

Hmm ok, when i tried parenting top of the spine to the “shoulder” or on arm, the chain that appeared looked like it was connected to the bottom of the shoulder bone. And i was worried that that would result in weird motion when animating. is this not the case?

ill mess around with it some more though

thanks!

4

I’m not getting a clear picture of your problem. Could you post a blend please?

5

Heres the .blend, try parenting them, if you can get it to work, or i just didn’t understand how to fix it. Post a fixed version! :evilgrin:

Attachments

Test dummy - Bob test rig.blend (261 KB)

6

I don’t quite understand your rig because I usually have the spine/neck/head chain going up not down so I prepared a sample file explaining the process. If this fixes your problem remember to rename this post to ‘[SOLVED] some useful name’

Attachments

offset-sample.blend (188 KB)

7

hmm, i did what you did on the second layer and ill try to move that over to my rig. thanks

8

Cool, let me know how it goes. Your mesh is great btw.

9

It’s one of the base meshes that you can make in silo 2.0 (i got the trial the other day)

but i did a little altering, nothing special though. i just feel like i spend alot of time when using blender modeling and trying to learn more about that and rigging than i do actual animation. so i tried a quick rig and it didn’t work out very well lol.

so i think i’m going to play around with mancandy and some other ones until i know how to actually rig a character.

thanks again for your help!

10

There are two great beginning tutorials here:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Your_First_Animation_in_30_plus_30_Minutes_Part_I

11

Good idea grarr. I was just going to recommend ManCandy to you before I read you were going to use it. But be warned, don’t try to dissect mancandy to get an idea about rigs. I tried and now I am addicted to it : /
Happy Blending!

12

yeah i took at peak at the technical side of the rig and its quite a lot heh.

i think i’ll stick to my little walk cycles lol, for now at least